These are the same people that think setting a pet on fire is "hilarious". Every generation looks at the one coming up and wonders if they were this bad...but I'm sure of this as I am anything else in my life - the generations coming after mine are a thing of horror. I'm sure that doesn't apply to all of them, but this sort of thing just didn't seem to happen as often 20 years ago, did it?

Yes, things like this happened. In fact, one of the various "Crimes of the Century" was the Leopold and Loeb case where two teens just decided to kill some people because they figured they could get away with it, and it would be an interesting mental challenge. IIRC, there was some deviance involved, though that may have been the "shocking" inference that the boys may have been homosexuals.

With the 24 hour news cycle, there is a need to fill it and get viewers. Consequently, if something seems to catch, they will both milk it to death and report on similar stories. This is why, when a kid falls down a well, there seem to be a rash of kids falling down wells.

In the old days, things were on the news and you might get a follow up story (or in the paper, depending on how far back you want to go). Or you'd hear second hand stories, and they spiral and grow over time, but they get told like they just happened and are much worse (this actually still happens, obviously). This is why, every Halloween, parents methodically go through their kids' candy for razor blades or poison, fearing that some stranger has done something horrible, despite the fact that the only real reported case of anything like this happened in the 70s when a father replaced his own kid's Pixie Stick with Drano and then slipped a couple more into other bags to throw off suspicion.